Profit, planet and people in supply chain: grand challenges and future opportunities

Abstract

Recent pressure from governments and customers on supply chain organizations to consider environmental and social issues has increased dramatically. The challenge ahead for supply chain managers is how to grow business profit while protecting the planet and respecting people’s rights. The significance of this issue motivates researchers in the fields of “sustainability” and “supply chain” to further integrate these concepts. To identify affected areas, and how sustainability influences them, this research has employed a literature survey of related papers published between 2012 and 2016 within 16 A* indexed journals that are relevant to Information and Computing Science, Transportation/Freight Services and Manufacturing Engineering. Findings show that sustainable supply chain network structure, impact factors, relationship integration and performance evaluation are the main research topics in these streams. The role of decision-making tools within each discipline, the key methodologies and techniques are discussed. Generally speaking, primary challenges in the sustainable supply chain domain devolve from use of inadequate decision-making tools and inappropriate information systems. The holistic picture presented in this paper is important for helping scholars, system developers, and supply chain analysts to become more aware of current grand challenges and future research opportunities within this field.